Authors: Peter Buwalda
He and his pa picked the desk back up, this time both of them holding it by the tabletop, so that they could take the corner with small steps, his father facing backward. Although his arms were
trembling from the exertion, he still had time to ponder the whole judo issue. He couldn’t
not
think about it. They had another twenty meters or so to go when his brother-in-law’s dark-green Volkswagen came rattling around the corner. Gerrit parked across from No. 23. When his father set down his end and turned around, something in Siem’s cranium started careening and crashing about. He watched as Gerrit climbed like a flightless bird from the dark-green dome. Gerrit had recently given his father a lift to Rotterdam. It was enthusiastic indignation that banged around inside his skull. Loes and her husband had a Volkswagen. A
German
thing, a car thought up by fucking Adolf Hitler. And his father was quite happy to ride around in it! In Hitler’s car!
“I’ll take over for you,” Gerrit called from across the street to Siem’s father, who was leaning with his back against the edge of the desk.
“Pa,” he said, but his father did not turn around. “Pa,” he shouted, “could you please tell me why Loes and Gerrit can drive a Kraut car, but I can’t go to judo?”
It all happened so fast. In two steps his father was around the side of the desk, he’d never seen him so agile and athletic before. And then: exquisite pain. The palm of his father’s hand landed mercilessly against his left ear, the fragile organ not yet cauliflowered by sixteen years of competitive judo. Tears sprang from his ducts, but he gritted his teeth, squeezing back the fluid with his eyelids until he could once again focus on the knotty wood of the desk. His father raised his arm and pointed down the street they had just come from. “Out of my sight,” he said. “
Move.
”
Hans and Ria used to live in a small third-floor walk-up on a side street of the Antonius Matthaeuslaan; now they own a
renovated brownstone overlooking Wilhelmina Park that Hans financed with the wholesale import of South African wine. They eat in the shady backyard. After a few glasses of Kranskop red, Sigerius debates the mathematical merits of chess with his host, a club chess player with black-and-white opinions. The obnoxious fanaticism with which he insists on his pet opinion (which he in fact borrowed from G. H. Hardy)—that despite its charm, chess lacks something essential, it is inconsequential as opposed to mathematics: “mathematics is elegant
and
relevant, Hans, you can’t say that about chess”—makes him realize how much that boat is eating at him. He
must
find a way to get up into that attic.
The next morning, as they are saying their farewells, they accept the invitation to celebrate Christmas with Hans and Ria in their chalet in the French Alps. Tineke takes the wheel and drives, as they always do when they’re in Utrecht together, down the Antonius Matthaeuslaan—but he hardly bothers to look. Should he go back to Aaron’s house? He compares himself to his father, wonders whether, until that championship jenever, he really was completely in the dark. Of
course
he knew. He used to see his father’s obstinate ignorance of his judo as pure weakness, as oversimplification and, as the years went on, as the plain indifference of an old fart. For the first time, he seriously tries to step out of that mindset and into the resentment his deeply humiliated father must have felt. This exercise in empathy makes him realize that his father tacitly tolerated his judo, despite his wartime trauma. When his pa died in 1964, Sigerius was secretly relieved—he dreaded facing the man after his training year in Japan, his relief was purely selfish. But in the hectic days after their weekend in Utrecht, that old feeling takes on a new taste; for the first time, he’s glad his father no longer had to put up with it, for the first time, he’s relieved
for his father’s sake
. Shouldn’t he do the same, just turn a blind eye himself? Just
like his father, pretend everything’s hunky-dory. Know but don’t know. Until the neighbor’s kid comes over one evening to say your son is national champion. But what, he wonders, what will they come over to tell him?
Wednesday morning the fireworks disaster commission meets, and at the end of the afternoon he grabs his chance. At half-past four he crosses the administration parking lot with his sports jacket draped over his arm. Humming, he gets in his university car and drives down the Hengelosestraat. He parks in front of the McDonald’s on Schuttersveld and walks over to the hardware center.
A timid, pimply boy in a red polo shirt with the store’s logo leads him to a display of grinding tools and bolt cutters. He buys the next-to-smallest cutting shears, which are still enormous, and drives back to campus. To his satisfaction he finds the farmhouse empty. In their bedroom, he removes his suit and goes into the bathroom. He takes a lukewarm shower. If he inhales deeply, his chest resonates with a pleasant edginess. He dries himself off, walks naked into the dressing room, puts on beige khakis, loafers without socks, and a pale-orange polo shirt. Not too theatrical? He checks himself out in the full-length mirror and decides to put his suit back on after all.
After a certain amount of searching he finds, in the bedroom cupboard, a large tennis bag; he stows the bolt cutter in it diagonally. He leaves a note for Tineke in the living room: “Hi hon, how was it with your sister? Afraid I can’t get out of eating with the guys from that debating team. After that we’ll watch France-Holland together. See you later, S.”
Just after six he drives down the Hengelosestraat for the second time. Evening rush hour is thinning out, he’s got both front windows halfway open and he’s playing a Cannonball Adderley CD. It’s a warm, windless evening, a large, languid sun paints over the city like a damaged maquette. There are lots of people about,
bicyclists weaving in and out, men with rolled-up pant legs playing soccer in parks. But it is a film. Cannonball’s elastic alto sax goes with this film—not with him. The warm evening breeze blows through his car, but he is entirely detached from Enschede.
He approaches Roombeek via the Lasondersingel. The fencing looks older than the city itself. He parks the car in the small lot in front of the low-rise apartment block, the bunker that protected Aaron’s street from the shock wave. The athletic bag weighs heavily on his shoulder and grazes the overhanging conifers along the front path. This time the lock opens without resisting.
He enters the hall like in a recurring dream: the faint animal smell, the rustle of junk mail on the mat. He closes the door and listens with bated breath. A million dust particles exchange places, the whirl of silence. In the living room, a familiar tableau: the wall-to-wall curtains at the back are still drawn, the badminton rackets on the coffee table have not rearranged themselves. His mouth is dry, he drinks with long gulps from the kitchen faucet. He stands for a moment at the kitchen window. Aaron’s bike leans up against the wide hedge of conifers.
With soundless adrenaline-laced steps he takes the stairs up to the landing. The smell of dust and washing. He sets down the bag, fingers the cotton of his judo suit superstitiously, and looks up. The eternal patience of objects. Does he dare? His battle plan is simple: snip open the padlock; if he finds nothing then he’s made a monumental error, in which case he will leave this row house in jubilation and what happened to that padlock will remain a mystery forever; if he does find what he’s afraid of finding, then the padlock doesn’t … then
nothing
matters anymore.
He wriggles the bolt cutters out of the bag. The jaw is made of glistening, virgin steel. The rubber-sheathed grips are so long that he does not need a chair. His heart pounding, he raises the
shears and places the jaw on the shiny U. It takes some effort to squeeze the tool, his upper arms quiver, the bolt cutter is heavy. He gives it one good thrust, and the blades glide through the steel as if through a licorice shoelace. To remove the lock from the rings in the trapdoor and molding he has to get a chair from the study after all, his legs tremble as he climbs onto it. With a dull thud the broken padlock drops into the athletic bag. He takes a deep breath and, the hatch crackling hellishly, he pulls down the folding stairs.
The rectangular hole leading to the attic: a soap film stretches between the wooden edges, a stubborn molecular membrane of last-ditch hope. The fervent hope of paranoia, the hope that things will turn out all right, a softly glistening skin that he puts to the test with every creaking rung—until his eyes scan the attic and the film bursts.
What else did you expect?
He mustn’t fall. As though he’s being crucified, he stretches his arms out over the bloodred carpeting, two nails through his palms. In the ensuing seconds he consists only of head and arms: his legs, his torso, the stairs, the house, Enschede—the whole earth has been swept away underneath him.
What he recognizes from the photos unfolds at lightning speed into three dimensions, what in the pictures was odorless, and essentially innocuous, now has the deadly aroma of unfinished wood, of dust, and of something soft, something feminine, expensive talcum powder. What he experiences is perversely akin to a mathematical proof, to what his beloved Hardy meant by revelation coupled with inevitability; to efficiency, elegance: the dazzling lamp that suddenly becomes illuminated when you hit upon a proof. Now everything blacks out.
He becomes aware of a distant, heavy panting—the rhythm of his own breathing. The attic is more spacious than he had expected, the red wall-to-wall carpeting chafes his arms. Twilight falls softly through a closed Velux roof window. In the middle of the room, a wooden bed in romantic country-cottage style, pillows with lace edging, a white duvet puffed up like fresh snow in a Dickens film. On either side, two tripods with flood lamps. The professionalism of those two scarecrows is devastating—this is no attic, this is a
studio
. The sloping walls are decorated with posters, carefully chosen posters, he appreciates at once, posters that deliberately have nothing to do with Joni and Aaron: a panorama photo of the Grand Canyon, the picture with the two kittens, Celine Dion in Las Vegas. Against the outside wall, covered in pink-and-white-striped wallpaper, he spots the bookcase filled with the American books, he recognizes it from the photos in Shanghai—a wave of bitterness and revulsion jolts through him: the calculated forethought, the devious perfection of that bookcase.
Off to the right, under the Velux window, he sees a small desk with a PC; lower, at eye level, where the sloping ceiling disappears into a sharp, dark corner, clothes spill out of canvas drawer units on casters: dresses, it appears, lingerie, so there they are, the sales boosters. Across the room, a green dressing table with an oval mirror; on it are various spray cans and roll-on deodorants, in front of it a nostalgic mannequin with, instead of limbs, a four-legged frame on wheels. Atop the faceless wooden head rests the straight black wig of his forebodings. Feeling as if he’s been struck, he realizes that the objects on the dressing table are not deodorants, but plastic penises. His eyes well up with tears. Dildos. He can
think
the word, that far he can go, but he will never be able to say it out loud.
For a few minutes he stares, panting, at the peak of the roof, poisoned by the scent of talcum. A supporting beam runs across the
entire breadth of the attic. Just swing a rope over it. The moment he realizes that his eyes are searching for a chair, he bangs both fists on the carpeting, hard, he almost loses his balance, the ladder underneath him wobbles and creaks.
He is a man who knows how much effort it takes to achieve something people will be impressed by, often for a disappointingly short time, perhaps because they do not appreciate the immensity of the preparations involved. The first time he detected a trace of that talent in Joni—the ability to work long and hard toward a distant goal—was in Boston. She had to prepare a final project on a subject of her choice, and this eleven-year-old girl produced a twenty-page paper on Dwight D. Eisenhower. While her classmates chose subjects like Afghan hounds or volcanoes or the Boston Red Sox, she gave an in-depth account of West Point, the Normandy invasions, the United Nations, Ike in the White House—knowledge she had collected from various sources in the MIT library, where, using his pass, she spent several afternoons perusing and photocopying illustrations and text. He was touched by Joni’s project, for which she got an A-minus (that “minus” being the discrepancy between her own middling English and the too-perfect English of the excerpts she’d overenthusiastically copied from thick Harvard biographies—she admitted as much). It instilled him with confidence in her future.
The knowledge that she applied that same thoroughness, the same intelligence and tenacity, to concocting this Internet brothel … Is this why he encouraged her schoolwork? Taught her to follow through? To put together a fake bookcase?
To play the whore up in some attic?
Behind him he discovers a rack of pumps. He recognizes the
shoes, right down to the last pair, the patent leather pumps in every jellybean color, the white ones with the little bows, the Burberrys, the ankle straps, the open toes. Shoes he’s never seen his daughter actually wear. With great effort he reaches for the rack and just manages to flick off a black satin number, lifting it over with his pinkie. The heel is slender and delicate, above the toe there’s a small, soft fabric rosette. “Karen Millen” is printed on the insole. He caresses the heel with his index finger. Then he hurls it across the room, it hits the bookcase with a hollow clack and falls to the floor.
He orders his numbed legs back down the folding stairs. On the landing he thrusts the bolt cutters back into the carryall, he wants to push the ladder back up, but reconsiders. To be alone for longer. No one around. Panic at the idea of having to watch a football match in a full students’ union. Clutching the tennis bag he goes downstairs and walks into the deathly quiet living room. He puts the bag on one of the leather armchairs and sinks onto the purple sofa, gets up again and squats in front of a low oak cupboard with etched-glass doors; glasses on a shelf, bottles of liquor in the wooden belly. He pulls out an open bottle of Jim Beam, fills an old-fashioned tumbler and stretches out on the sofa with the bottle and the glass. He drinks with his eyes closed. And now? Now what? His thoughts, he realizes, have not yet gone beyond this point, all these weeks he has unconsciously firmly planted himself on the axis of the lucky break. That dimension has been pulverized, curled up, retracted: he is a flatlander, his new reality is level and bleak. He can no longer dodge the fact that his daughter and her boyfriend were … he is reluctant, no, he is
unable
to use the word “porn,” it is too ignominious, the word itself makes him feel too wretched. He wants to tear it apart, letter for letter, burn each letter separately, scatter the ash on five different continents. He refills the tumbler to keep from flinging it through the television screen.
Above the TV hangs a large painting, a landscape with thick brush strokes, art on loan. Something has to be broken. Whiskey against canvas, in his mind’s eye he sees the tumbler shatter, the alcohol dissolving the paint. Once, just once, he’d set foot in a sex shop, one of those places with blackened windows, a place that cannot endure daylight. Rent one of those films, Tineke’s suggestion, no, a friend of Tineke’s. You two should try one of those films. “Why do you discuss our sex life?” “What sex life, Siem?” So all right, he goes. But what a sorry sight. Walking into that blacked-out, backstreet joint. Everything in him resists walking into a place with a nude broad painted on the front. But he does it. Once inside, the thought that soon he’s got to go back outside again. The smell of plastic videotapes, man sweat, carpeting. The smell of semen. The louse behind his cum-counter. The displays of tapes, the plastic dicks, the men creeping out of the cabins like cockroaches. The
looking
, which film, hurry up,
decide
, for God’s sake. And while he’s standing there, roach among the roaches, awkward, miserable, horny, in comes a guy in a raincoat. Sets a stack of videotapes on the counter; “late,” he mumbles. Out of the corner of his eye he watches the louse retrieve them and stab at a calculator. “That’ll be 1,043 guilders and 30 cents.” Just once he sets foot into this kind of joint and this happens. The raincoat digs around in his pockets, counts out eleven 100-guilder bills and leaves.
That
is porn, Joni.